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Street dept. pact OK’d
By DAVID SKOLNICK
YOUNGSTOWN
Not wanting to strike, the 31-member city street- department union approv-ed the administration’s “last, best and final” contract offer, its president said.
“The contract passed narrowly,” said Sam Prosser, president of Teamsters Local 377. The margin was narrow “enough to suggest that some of the guys aren’t happy.”
Prosser declined to disclose the results of Monday’s vote.
If the union rejected the contract, its members would have gone on strike, Prosser said.
“We’re happy we’re not going on strike, but we’re disappointed that some of the guys are taking that big of a pay decrease,” Prosser said.
The “pay decrease” Prosser referred to is extra money union members at the street department receive for working a job with a higher pay classification.
Under a 2008 grievance settlement, a provision not included in the new contract, the workers received the highest rate of pay in those situations.
The top rate is about $1.60 to $3.70 per hour more than what the city is willing to pay, according to an executive summary of the contract.
The city will pay the second-highest per-hour level, Mayor Jay Williams said Friday.
Though the mayor commented on the proposal Friday, he declined Monday to discuss the contract ratification.
“We haven’t received formal notification of the ratification, and we’re restricted [under state collective- bargaining laws] from commenting until then,” Williams said.
The contract’s other major issue was the union wanted daily job bidding based on seniority as long as the employee is qualified for the job, Presser said.
That policy ended three years ago.
Williams said last week that the policy is “inefficient and ineffective” and “takes away time from actual work.”
The Teamsters agreed to a three-year pay freeze, as have other city unions in the past few months.
Prosser said city officials “threatened to change the contract’s expiration date” if the union members didn’t approve the contract.
The old deal expired Dec. 31, 2009. The new deal will take effect shortly.
If the contract’s approval date were retroactive, workers who earned money out of their job classification for the past three-plus months would have had to reimburse a portion of it to the city.